


Skinless

by Koeji



Category: Tales of Xillia
Genre: Food Porn, Implied/Referenced Incest, It can be not incest if you want but it's less interesting that way, Julius end, M/M, Sad cooking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 12:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6955930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which, just for a moment, Julius tries to live in Ludger's world. Hands are funny things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skinless

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Ailia for being my lovely beta-reader!

They’ve been cooking together for a while now—since the accident in Ludger’s youth that left a permanent scar on Julius’s left hand. His big brother had decided then and there that he couldn’t be left to do the cooking alone. Of course, “cooking together” is a loose term for what they do; Julius chops, mostly. Chops and skins. And it’s taken him nearly ten years to master that much. Ludger is still constantly making corrections—digging black eyes out of potatoes, peeling the last clinging bits of translucent skin from onions. On the rare nights he allows Julius to attempt actual cooking, Ludger scrapes the blackened crust from the meat, trying to preserve what little fleshy bits might remain underneath. Nothing much is ever left; that’s why Ludger cooks backup dishes in advance, stashes them in the back of the fridge to be miraculously discovered in their time of need. Rollo is grateful for those nights. He finds the salvaged bits in his food dish.

Before everything happened, Julius couldn’t cook with him like this very often. He was busy with work until five or six at night, sometimes later—when he came home, he didn’t have the energy to help. Ludger took some pride in having a meal ready when Julius came home. Back then, it was the least he could do to ease the wrinkles around his brother’s eyes. But there were always more wrinkles taking their place; wrinkles of fatigue around his eyes replaced by affectionate smiles, then the arched eyebrows wrinkling the skin above his nose. The wrinkles were the first way Ludger noticed Julius’s sadness. At ten years old, he didn’t know what that sadness meant. All he knew was that Julius seemed happier when they could be together, and he seemed to know himself best with a sword in his hand, so Ludger gave him a knife and a place in the kitchen. 

And some nights they could be together like that. Julius would come home a little early. He’d be a little less tired, a little more genial, a little more present in this world in the amber light of the setting sun. He’d bring some fresh groceries, and Ludger would find a combination of them that would make something good. That was Julius’s favorite part: seeing Ludger empty the bags, lay everything out on the countertop in a grid, like a chessboard, survey them with bright eyes, and then selecting four or five and putting the rest away neatly in the cupboard. Sometimes Ludger liked to plan in advance; sometimes he told Julius to surprise him, bring home anything he wanted, and Ludger would find some way to put them all together. It was a skill he developed over years—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, the combinations becoming more and more complex. He had a way of putting his fingers to his chin when he was deep in thought—a trait he had somehow picked up from Julius. 

When the ingredients were decided on, Julius took up his station, chopping greens and reds and deep purples and trying to keep his own blood off the leaves. It was always a struggle at first, finding that rhythm. Think too hard about it and the knife suddenly comes down on the edge of a finger. Slices become uneven, some thick and some thin, some broken in pieces. It wasn’t like using a sword; Julius had long moved past considering the rhythm of his blade’s slices through the air. Chopping vegetables was different. In a way, they were soft, helpless things, things that demanded to be used for something beautiful, if only because Ludger was the one to use them, if only because Ludger was the one watching them. Food had a rhythm inherent to them it guided Julius’s knife once it was discovered. Ludger seemed to know that rhythm on instinct. When Julius’s slices came uneven, Ludger would sidle up to his side, place his hand over Julius’s. Show him the infinitesimally thin, ghostly lines along the stalk of a green onion. He curled his fingers between Julius’s, wrist tensed over the handle, and moved his brother’s hand up and down, forward and back. Up and down. Forward and back. Julius liked it when they found the rhythm together. Ludger’s hands were soft and gentle, and when he pulled back he always tugged his finger over the scar on Julius’s hand, watching its shiny pink surface catch the fluorescent lights.

Julius could never follow it so closely that his hands could move independently, and he was slow to improve; every week, his hands reset themselves, handling the vegetables clumsily, his fingers curled like stiff, useless clubs around the knife handle. But with one foot tentatively in the rhythm of cutting, he could peel his eyes away for a glance at Ludger, eighteen, nineteen, the first half of twenty years old, a level of absorption into his work that Julius will never reach. Ludger’s rhythm was unlike his own. Sometimes he sautéed, thick white onion crescents in bubbling brown sauce, jerking the skillet back and forth, the sizzling rising in crescendo at the heights of his movements. Wiping the sweat from his brow and, in a brief moment of reprieve from his trance, extending a hand to Julius, asking for more ingredients. The heat of the stove has soaked into his skin, pores browned and caramelized, eyes sickly sweet. Sometimes he boiled pasta, stirring with a long wooden spoon. The heat would rise and fill the apartment so subtly that Julius would only remember to turn on the fan when his glasses fogged up. Ludger liked to make his own pasta when he could. Draping the long, floury tendrils between his hands, he lowered them into the boiling water and stirred with such gentle affection and admiration that they might be his own children. Store-bought pasta was forever ruined for Julius.

“You should become a chef once you graduate,” Julius would say.

“Maybe,” Ludger would say. “But only if Spirius turns me down.”

Julius’s knife hit he cutting board hard. “How about you work for Spirius only if being a chef doesn’t work out?”

Ludger wore a small smile. “It’s different, cooking as a job. Right now it’s something I only do for you. I kind of like it that way.” 

Julius would have a retort ready, another angle to come from in hopes of shutting Ludger’s dreams of Spirius down—but Ludger would be ready too, holding a spoon of whatever was at hand in front of Julius’s lips. Julius may have been the older brother, but the kitchen was Ludger’s dominant space; he decided how they would move, what they would say, whether or not Julius had the privilege of being by his side. So, as he took the spoon in his mouth, Julius had nothing to say. 

Truth be told, Julius liked it that way too—being the sole recipient of Ludger’s cooking. He liked coming home to an apartment smelling of spices and fresh tomato paste. He liked finding lunchboxes packed for him in the morning, knowing that either after he went to sleep or before he woke up, Ludger had snuck into the kitchen and filled a little plastic tub with leftovers and some fresh-cut vegetables or rice. Cooking was one of the only things Julius hadn’t taught Ludger to do; it was a skill he’d developed only for Julius from the very start, back when Ludger thought he could fill the places where Julius’s sadness rubbed him raw and thin like a sheet of dough. And, over ten years later, Ludger wasn’t wrong. Julius still came home—despite everything, he still came home. More tired than ever.

Things are different now, Ludger knows. Different in the slightest of ways, in ways they don’t talk about. Their father is dead. Julius’s hand is still dark and hard, but the blackness has stopped advancing. Quietly, they’re both waiting for it to retreat, but they’re prepared for the possibility that it will be like that forever as a reminder. It’s a little harder for Julius to cut now. His hand is stiff, reluctant to close around the hilt of a knife, and neither of them know when he’s accidentally cut himself until one of them notices the blood. Ludger is always on the lookout for blood now. He wonders how Julius went so long fighting without being able to notice it himself. He’s tried to get Julius to stop helping him; he’s fine on his own, he’s always been fine, and someday Julius will lay his palm on a hot stove burner or the handle of a bubbling pot and neither of them will notice it until his hand bubbles with blisters. But Julius won’t stop. They cook together more than ever and Ludger watches for blood. There’s something both heavy and light about it—being together, Ludger watching Julius like Julius always watched him. The things that link them hang heavy between their bodies like a sagging clothesline. They dart in and out of the drying sheets on a sunshiny day. 

Even now, cutting through the darkness, Ludger can see the smooth, branching web of the scar on the back of Julius’s hand.

Why does Julius care so much? Ludger wonders. Why do they need to do this together now—sweat against sticky, sweet steam, flour revealing the whorls of their fingerprints, Julius’s dark hand smeared with a dark gradient of the colors of crushed vegetables. The pasta they made together is bubbling in the pot. Ludger wipes his hands of the flour and braces the lid against the lip of the pot to drain the liquid into the sink. He can feel Julius watching him, watching his knuckles whiten with effort around the pot handle. For that moment, neither of them breathe; the steam fills their lungs, waters Ludger’s eyes. Then Ludger uprights the pot, and they breathe. Maybe Julius cares for those moments, Ludger thinks—the chance moments when their hands move the same way, when they’re breathing the same way. There are things they can only say in those moments together, not with words, but in the simple unity of their movements. For Ludger, who has been quiet all his life, these moments choke him. A mass of unsaid thoughts prods at his throat. There is far too much and not enough. And Julius—even now, Julius speaks the best with a knife in his hand.

They eat together. In his mind, Ludger catalogs his brother: an endless yet finite list of facts and movements and glances. He loves tomatoes. He hates eggplant. He works—worked?—for the Spirius Corporation. Became their crown agent. He loves his little brother very much, but not enough to continue what he once tried to say just before he cut his own throat. He loves Ludger’s pasta best of all, and he is trying as hard as he can with the time he has left.

The pasta sauce is spicy and sweet on their tongues.

“You should really become a chef,” Julius says again.

It makes Ludger want to cry. He blinks into the future.

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to make this cute and fun and maybe sexual but it turned out sad, imagine that


End file.
